I have started trying to organize, simplify and condense my life and one of the things I have found useful is scanning in documents and then throwing away the original. Obviously there are still some documents you need to keep around, but for personal documents, notes, receipts, etc, this is very handy. With this new goal I found it useful to scan these docs to PDF rather than images. My scanner, and old Dell AIO 920 (which will not work with Vista but don’t get me started) has not built in means of scanning to pdf that I could find, but I figured out a simple work-around, PDFCreator. If you have never used or heard of PDFCreator you should look into it; basically it installs a virtual printer that prints to PDF documents rather than to paper, very handy in itself.

To scan to PDF what I do is scan my document (say a page of handwritten notes) to an image file, JPEG is what my scanner scans into. Then, I open the image or images in the Windows viewer and click the print button. The print button spawns a print wizard allowing you to rotate, shrink to fit, etc. Once you have selected what you want, print it to PDFCreator which creates a nice PDF document for you.

I have gotten true to life quality with this method such that I could print them back out and barely tell the difference when compared to the original.

Also this is nice because it scans in color which is sometimes nice to have.